


Fragmentation

by ccauchemar



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Aussie Summer is Awful, Derealization, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Gen, Group Therapy, Guest appearance by Latrodectus hasselti, POV is widow unless stated otherwise, Vignettes, dissociating is terrifying, living is exhilarating, tags added as necessary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 06:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13358676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ccauchemar/pseuds/ccauchemar
Summary: Snippets to warm up my descriptive muscles and act as an outlet. Writing was good for me and I don't plan to stop.





	1. mémoire

**Author's Note:**

> allusions to trauma

How do you put the pieces back together? Watching new friends and friends of friends piece together their stories from reason and rhyme, but it doesn't click. It doesn't quite click in a way you want it to, in a way you like, until it gets deep. Almost too deep, some of them say. You are sympathetic, and give them their stage. They share their experiences of mire and pain and speak to one another, and you speak with them too. You understand. But it's not quite enough, part of you thinks. They're not quite the same. And then you're plunging your hands into the muck below the mire, dragging up pieces of being and oozing toxic memories, and most of them recoil at the writhing, pulsating _shit_ you've just exposed. Some of them nod. Some of them understand. You're in therapy. But it's an awkward, tense few minutes til the topic moves on, and some part of you still wishes you had the stage.

You learn to make friends with the ones who nod.


	2. redback

Summer heat glues her white tank top to her back. Her shoulders are dewy and stray hairs stick to her face, which has a rare flush of colour and beads of sweat. An old, off white ceiling fan spins as fast as it can. Cicadas whine in the lone liquidamber oak among the pale eucalypts outside, a drone in the heat. Her partner is slumped in a woven wicker chair, arms over the back and head lolled forwards, legs askew and all over the floor; no doubt to wake with a vicious neck pain. The light of the accelerator breathes in its portable charging cradle. She knows its ebb and flow mimics its owner’s lungs.

The wind whispers through the leaves, bringing with it a desperately needed touch of coolness. She eyes her rifle as it rests against the wall. Waiting. Patient. Sleek, silver and blue. It's just a tool, she thinks to herself, and reflects on its past.

She feels a stirring in the back of her mind, and decides she should rest. She pulls the pillow closer to herself, and rolls to her side to let sleep claim her.

In the evening light outside, under a potted plant, a little red striped black spider catches ants, patient and natural and alive.


	3. blue

She sees a threat to her control when the little shit appears. It's all the worse for not being _her_ , for not being someone she can see.

A “little shit” who had seen, had done more than she, they said, someone who had experienced more and done more and said more and healed more.

Someone who was an annoyance, and got in the way. Someone whose emotions clouded their judgement and made them weak. Someone with eight or ten insectoid eyes and mandibles and a generous number of arms, possibly eight.

Someone who never gave up trying to explain and let her change. Someone who relentlessly fought her, for her, for her memory and her health. Someone whose many eyes were a facade and whose form was made from pain.

Someone whose arms were soft and whose heartbeat was gentle, soft breaths and soft hair and soft clothes, soft sleepy breathing and soft blue magic all wrapped up in her protective arms; a part of her she'd never thought of loving, and a part of her that had never given up loving her til she learned how to love back.


	4. survival

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw smoking and allusion to suicidality

Being empty felt like thunder and winter and a specific song, a beat for the heart she could not feel and the feelings she could not understand.

Being empty felt like the feeling of exhaling cigarette smoke for the first time, and the first few times, and all the times after that. A taste and a feeling to fill the void, and a habit that crept into the cracks of her stress.

Being empty felt like living life just because you could, and existing because you could. Why die, when you couldn't do anything any more? And besides, nobody would be able to follow her there.

It was much more interesting to keep existing.


	5. revival

Living was freeing. Living was exhilarating.

The feeling of singing, crooning lyrics that spoke of pain and hope and change, bright and powerful, rising from their hands and arms and legs and feet, spilling from their lips like jewels and love.

The feeling of completing a simple video game, mundane, just for the story after the end, the tears that spill as it speaks of living, of love, of comfort and understanding and something bigger than they.

The feeling of joy, just because they can, of knowing they're alive, they're alive and they're free and nothing can stop them, nothing can stop their love.


	6. gun pun

She remembers that the medical term is _triggered_ , and laughs, once, to herself, as her hands curl and wind about her metallic fifth limb.


	7. adrift

It happens so quickly. It's impossible to control the ever-alternating parts in her mind; coercive and tantalising and _not quite evil_ , she tries to tell herself, _it's not her fault she's like this_ \- but time is a blur now. Days pass before she resurfaces properly, a glimpse in the void of _impulsitivity_ , Amélie tells her, and she suddenly remembers rummaging blindly through her room and making food she didn't eat and buying things she had no use for, someone else’s hands and panicked eyes in the muck.

She makes a mental note to talk to her therapist, but then the balance of consciousness tips, and she's gone.


	8. waxen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> smoking

When she smokes so infrequently it makes her cough, she thinks she has it under control.

Out on the front doorstep, she smokes. She listens to melancholy music through her phone, and feels the beat alongside her heart. A pacifier.

A warning.

Something blue decides it's had enough, and snaps the cigarette in two.

They leave it on the balcony as a warning. It's not entirely enough, but it helps.


	9. narrative sense

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An experiment using a common thought process of mine that becomes extremely, severely meta in an actual text format, and would appear dangerously close to wank territory if I was to write it in fic “unironically”, ie. without warning or explanation. DRDP beware. This could potentially be confusing to read.

She lies in bed, arms folded behind her head, thinking. She shifts in bed, and rolls her eyes at the ceiling.

“I'm thinking,” she says. “I don't think this is necessary.”

Her voice is defiant, in a way. She doesn't want to think that what she does is real.

 _My actions are real, and now, my decisions are my own_ , she thinks. Ah, but is it? Are her actions truly her own, or is what she says predetermined?

 _My actions are… mine,_ she says, thinking about how protagonists don't know the path the author has planned for them. What pitfalls lie ahead? What is she about to do?

 _My future… is my own_ , she says, unconvincingly, and thinks about how weak her own conviction is. What if it's true? What if she _is_ just a character in a story. What if everything she does has a set path, is invented by someone else, what if someone is reading or writing this right now, a slow unending archive of her life. Someone, somewhere, to love her, or someone to hate her. What kind of a character would she be? A good one, or a bad? People would know her faults. Her past. Things she tries so hard to hide. She feels shame spread throughout her body, and subtly pulls her arms closer.

“I'm not a character,” she says, but it's weak. “And you're putting words into my head.”

Maybe there were words being put into her head. But she was just thinking, and what good was a narrator who didn't play the devil’s advocate?

“A good fucking narrator,” she mutters, eyes stormy and voice barely more than a growl, arms wrapped around a pillow to hug against her chest. She thinks about how simple video games could be, and longs to co-op with Oxton.

What if _she_ was a video game character? I mean, the whole kidnapping and brainwashing thing was wild enough, and who  _kills their own husband and takes that as a theme_? That's just too much of a coincidence for her own good, it'd either be great or a laughing stock. Or if she was a Pokemon trainer, like Plumeria, Or the brainwashing, the machinery, just like Caroline, sweet Caroline, _cara bel, cara mia bella-_

She groans, and stuffs her face into the pillow, pushing all her most powerful energy into telling the narrator to stop talking and fuck off or else she would strangle him.


End file.
